The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Thursday, October 26, 2017

To escape the aerial
bombardment, IS decided to disappear underground, digging immense tunnel
complexes underneath its two biggest urban centres, Mosul in Iraq and
Raqqa in Syria

Shortly before the
siege of Raqqa began in June, Islamic State officials arrested Hammad
al-Sajer for skipping afternoon prayers. Hammad, who is 29, made a
living from his motorbike: he carried people and packages, charging less
than the local taxis. IS had arrested him a number of times before –
mostly for smoking cigarettes, which were banned under IS rule – but he
had always been released after paying a fine or being lashed. Attendance
at prayers was compulsory and he had missed the Asr, the afternoon
prayer, because a passenger had made him wait while he went into his
house to get money for his fare after a trip to Raqqa’s old city. Hammad
expected to be fined or lashed, but this time he was sentenced to a
month in prison. Except it turned out not to be prison. On his first
morning, ‘militants blindfolded us and took us in a vehicle to a place
that seemed to be inside the city because it took no more than ten
minutes to get there.’

Hammad and the other prisoners, all of them local men, were taken to
an empty house. In one of the rooms there was a hole in the floor. Rough
steps led down about sixty feet before the tunnel flattened out into a
corridor, which was connected to a labyrinth of other tunnels. A fellow
prisoner, Adnan, told Hammad that IS had started work on what was
effectively a subterranean network a year and a half earlier. In other
words, construction began in 2015, after IS’s spectacular run of
victories ended and it started its long retreat in the face of Kurdish
offensives backed by coalition firepower. To escape the aerial
bombardment, IS decided to disappear underground, digging immense tunnel
complexes underneath its two biggest urban centres, Mosul in Iraq and
Raqqa in Syria, to help it defend itself when the final assaults came.

Few
people in Raqqa knew the extent of the excavations going on beneath
their feet – not even Hammad, who rode his motorbike around the city
every day. The entrances were always in districts from which local
inhabitants had fled or been evicted. ‘When we got into the tunnels we
were amazed,’ Hammad remembers. ‘It was as if an entire city had been
built underground.’ IS must have needed an army of workers to build it –
but then there were large numbers of prisoners and jobless labourers to
draw on. The prisoners were told as little as possible about what they
were doing: anyone who asked a lot of questions was punished. Hammad saw
rooms with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings, and what looked like
boxes of ammunition piled up on the floor. When he asked about the
boxes, he says, one of the guards ‘hit me on my back with a piece of
cable and said: “Don’t poke your nose into things. This is not your
business. Do your job and keep quiet.”’ The foreign fighters on duty
were silent and unapproachable, but some of the guards were locals and
occasionally talked to the diggers during the ten-hour working day.
‘Sometimes they joked with us because they were bored and tired,’ he
says. One day he asked one of them what all this hard work was for.
‘This great construction will help the lions of the caliphate to
escape,’ he said (the ‘lions’ were the IS emirs and commanders). ‘They
have a message to deliver to people and they should not die too soon.’

IS
officials used prisoners to work on the tunnels when they could, but
they also hired labourers. One of these was Khalaf Ali. When IS seized
the city in 2014, he was selling cigarettes in the street. ‘I was picked
up by some militants who took me to a commander,’ he says. ‘They did
not take me to prison, but they confiscated my boxes of cigarettes and
said that if I sold cigarettes again, they would put me in prison and I
would get thirty lashes.’ He started spending his days in a local square
with other unemployed men; they would wait for a car or truck to stop
and offer them odd jobs – moving furniture, mending broken doors or
windows. In April 2016, Khalaf was sitting in the square with the others
when an IS security man said he wanted to talk to them. At first they
were nervous, but the official said they could have work if they
registered their names at an IS office. When they showed up at 7 a.m.
the following day, they were told they had to agree to certain
conditions: ‘We must not talk about what we were doing in public as it
was one of the caliphate’s secrets and, if we violated this condition,
they would kill us as traitors.’ They were blindfolded and driven a
short distance to an empty house, where the blindfolds were removed. It
wasn’t the house Hammad had first been taken to: here, there were no
stairs, just a sloping tunnel about 150 feet long, which took them
around sixty feet underground.

‘We entered an area that looked
like a residential complex,’ Khalaf remembers. ‘There were many rooms:
some under construction, others finished, with concrete walls.’ The
labourers used trolleys to move the excavated soil to a certain point in
the tunnel, where other men, whom he didn’t know, took charge of moving
it up to the surface to be dispersed. The various teams of workers were
forbidden to talk to one another. Khalaf’s team was responsible for
moving furniture, including sofas and beds, to completed rooms. ‘There
was electricity, though not in every room, and the corridor had lights.’
As the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) advanced towards
Raqqa and the American bombardment intensified, IS doubled wages from $4
to $8 a day, though money was deducted if the IS officials were
dissatisfied with the quality of the work. Once Khalaf asked an IS
militant who had first had the idea of building these underground
complexes. He was told that it was ‘our brothers in faith’: ‘in
Afghanistan,’ the militant said, ‘many attacks were repelled and failed
because of the tunnels.’

Hammad and Khalaf, who didn’t know each
other, escaped separately from Raqqa during the first weeks of the
siege. Hammad fled in the early morning with a group of men, moving from
house to house whenever there was a break in the fighting. They took
advantage of a tactical retreat by IS fighters to run towards the
Kurdish-led forces, stopping every ten minutes to hide behind walls and
the wreckage of houses until they reached safety. The SDF questioned
them to make sure that they weren’t IS infiltrators, and then took them
to a camp for displaced people at Ain al-Issa, north of Raqqa. Khalaf’s
journey out of Raqqa was even riskier: after a number of people in his
neighbourhood were killed, he and thirty others decided to try to escape
from the city guided by SDF radio broadcasts. Even so, Khalaf says,
they were sometimes trapped inside a house by the fighting for several
days. ‘Finally we fled, but we lost some of our friends,’ he says. ‘We
saw their bodies lying there as we ran, but everybody was afraid of
snipers so we couldn’t go back for them.’

The siege of Raqqa, a
small city on the Euphrates with a population before the war of less
than 300,000, has now been going on for four months. IS fanaticism is
one reason it hasn’t fallen sooner, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to
stop the SDF, with the might of American airpower behind it. The
network of tunnels connecting up bunkers, hideouts and hidden escape
routes is the key to the resistance. IS fighters are able to move
swiftly underground, shifting positions before they can be detected and
eliminated by bombing or shellfire. As in Mosul, the only way for the
attackers to advance without sustaining heavy losses has been to call in
coalition airstrikes so intense that much of the city has already been
destroyed. The Kurdish general commanding the SDF, Mazlum Kobane, was
quoted on 26 September as saying that his forces now hold 75 per cent of
Raqqa, but there are still some 700 IS fighters and 1500 pro-IS
militiamen in the city centre. They can probably hold out for weeks or
even months, using the same skills in urban warfare that IS demonstrated
during the siege of Mosul. A combination of snipers, suicide bombers,
mortar teams, mines and booby traps slow down and inflict damage on the
enemy. For IS, eventual defeat is inevitable, but they remain dangerous:
last month a group of IS fighters in SDF uniforms killed 28 SDF men in a
surprise attack.

Still, tactical agility won’t be enough to save
the caliphate, which is now being overwhelmed on multiple fronts.
Islamic State’s great strength came from the way it combined religious
cult and war machine; its weakness was that it saw the whole world as
its enemy, which meant that it would always be outnumbered and
outgunned. Without allies and dealing only in violence, it led an
unlikely alliance of states normally hostile to one another to find
common cause against it, and engage in a degree of reluctant
co-operation. As IS comes close to losing its power, old rivalries and
divisions are beginning to re-emerge – but in a political landscape
significantly reshaped by the war with IS.

A decision IS took
three years ago – after its columns had won speedy victories over the
Iraqi and Syrian armies and captured much of eastern Syria and western
Iraq – helped to set the stage for the next phase of the conflict:
instead of keeping up the pressure on the demoralised forces of the
central governments in Baghdad and Damascus, IS diverted its forces to
make war on the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria. In August 2014, it
launched a surprise attack on the Iraqi Kurds which almost reached their
capital, Erbil, and in September it started a prolonged assault on the
Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani. Quite why IS did this remains a mystery:
it’s possible that it was acting with the encouragement of Turkey, which
was alarmed by the growing strength of the once marginalised Syrian
Kurds. Whatever the explanation, the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq
unexpectedly found themselves, much to their political benefit, in the
front line of an international campaign against IS. The Peshmerga in
Iraq and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria were suddenly
awarded support from the most powerful air force in the world. Turkey
had been prepared to see Kobani fall to IS, but the city was saved by
intense US airstrikes, though 70 per cent of its buildings were left in
ruins. The US had been desperately seeking reliable ground troops in
Syria and found them in the YPG, which took control of much of the
southern side of the Syrian-Turkish border. In Iraq, the Kurds used the
defeat of the Iraqi army in northern Iraq at the time of the fall of
Mosul to seize the ‘disputed territories’ outside the boundaries of the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), thereby expanding the
Kurdish-controlled area by 40 per cent.

*

Kurdish leaders
in Syria and Iraq have long wondered, mostly in private, whether they
would be able to retain their political and military gains once IS was
on the road to defeat. Early last year, Muhammad Haji Mahmud, a senior
Peshmerga commander, told me that the war with IS had brought great
benefits to the Iraqi Kurds: ‘We have become a regular army, rather than
a guerrilla force; are supported by US and European air power; can buy
weapons openly; and are praised internationally for fighting terrorism.’
His big fear was that the Kurds wouldn’t ‘have the same value
internationally’ once Mosul was liberated and IS defeated. Nor did he
think they would have the strength to hold onto the disputed territories
without international support. In Syria, too, Kurdish leaders worry
that they are over-extended and too reliant on the Americans, who may
stop supporting them diplomatically and militarily once Raqqa and the
last IS strongholds have fallen. Turkish intervention is one threat;
another is the Syrian army, which – with Russian air cover – has
surrounded IS at Deir Ezzor and will now want to advance to take the
oilfields further east. Developments in Iraq and Syria often mirror each
other: the Syrian army captured East Aleppo in December 2016 and the
Iraqi army took Mosul seven months later. The trend in both Iraq and
Syria has been for the military power of the central government to
bounce back – which poses a mounting threat to Kurdish separatism.

Now
that the outcome of the war with IS is no longer really an issue, the
conflict in the region is turning towards confrontation over the powers,
and even the existence, of the two Kurdish quasi-states: the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, and what the Syrian Kurds call
Rojava, in the north-east corner of Syria. In 2012, following the
uprisings of the Arab Spring, the Syrian army withdrew from Kurdish
cities and towns in the area, and what to all intents and purposes is
the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which had
been fighting a guerrilla war in Turkey since 1984, took over. As a US
military ally against IS from 2014, the Syrian Kurds field an army about
50,000 strong. Their fighters are now moving into eastern Syria, where
they will confront advancing troops of the Syrian army. A collision is
probable and its outcome uncertain, but for the Kurds it is fraught with
danger, since they can’t know what American policy towards them will be
under Trump.

However, the first real post-IS crisis for the Kurds
has come not in Syria but Iraq. The non-binding referendum on
independence for the Iraqi Kurds held on 25 September was opposed by the
UN, US, UK, France and Germany as well as by regional powers including
Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The last three promised retaliation against the
KRG if the vote was held, a threat that its president, Masoud Barzani,
interpreted as a bluff. It turned out to be a very real threat and
within days of the referendum, Baghdad had closed Iraqi airspace to
international flights out of Erbil and Sulaimaniyah. The Iraqi
government held joint military manoeuvres with Turkey and Iran and is
threatening to take control of the KRG’s borders. The Kurds’
overwhelming vote for their own independent state has had the effect of
highlighting the scale of the obstacles to their self-determination.
Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi government are now united as never before and
in a position to enforce a blockade on the KRG; there is a limit to
what the Kurds can do by way of retaliation.

‘The Kurdish
leadership in Iraq doesn’t really have any military or diplomatic
options,’ says Omar Sheikhmous, a veteran Kurdish leader who believes
the KRG has badly overplayed its hand. Barzani’s decision to hold a
referendum – driven primarily by intra-Kurdish political divisions – may
come to seem a serious miscalculation. Before the poll, Barzani
rejected compromise proposals from the US and its European allies while
Kurdish leaders underestimated the likelihood of Turkey and Iran
following through on threats that had proved hollow in the past.
Sheikhmous had warned me before the vote that the Kurdish leadership in
Iraq could be about to ‘throw away all they had won over the previous
twenty or thirty years’. He compared the referendum with other classic
blunders in Iraqi history, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait
in 1990, when he entirely misjudged how other powers would respond. KRG
leaders wrongly believed that Turkey and Iran wouldn’t want to
jeopardise their sizeable economic interests in Iraqi Kurdistan by
objecting to the vote. But neither Turkey nor Iran can countenance the
prospect of independence for Iraqi Kurds since it would inflame their
own Kurdish minorities. Turkey’s reaction was especially hostile: the
Kurds, Erdoğan said, ‘are not forming an independent state, they are
opening a wound in the region to twist a knife in’. Barzani had
cultivated good relations with Erdoğan, who now says that the
relationship is finished: the KRG, ‘to which we provided all support,
took steps against us, it will pay the price’. In future, he says,
Turkey will deal only with the Iraqi government. Iraqi Kurds are hoping
the US will once again come to their rescue by mediating between them
and their opponents: they say the roads into Kurdistan are still open
and that nothing has yet changed on the ground. The KRG may survive its
present isolation but the risk is growing that the Kurdish quasi-states
will go the same way as the caliphate.

Patrick CockburnSource: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n20/patrick-cockburn/underground-in-raqqa Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

House of Representatives backs sanctions on Hezbollah as part of effort to take tough line against its chief backer, Iran.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday backed new sanctions on the Hezbollah terrorist group, Reuters reported.

The sanctions are part of an effort to take a tough line against
Iran, which is Hezbollah's chief backer, without immediately moving to
undermine the nuclear agreement signed between the West and the Islamic
Republic in 2015.

Three Hezbollah-related measures passed by voice vote, without opposition, according to Reuters.
The House will vote on Thursday on another bill, to impose additional
sanctions on Iran related to its ballistic missiles program.

The move comes nearly two weeks after President Donald Trump said he would not certify Iran is complying with an international agreement on its nuclear program.

Trump’s action opened a 60-day window for Congress to act to reimpose
sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program that were lifted under the
agreement, but there has been no move to do so in the House or Senate.

Aides told Reuters that, for now, House lawmakers are
focusing on clamping down on Iran in other ways such as the Hezbollah
and missile-related sanctions.

The first of the Hezbollah-related measures passed on Wednesday would
impose new sanctions on any entities found to support the group, such
as by providing weapons to Hezbollah. The second imposes sanctions on
Iran and Hezbollah for using civilians as human shields.

The U.S. named Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. Earlier this month, Washington offered multimillion-dollar rewards for two of its officials as the Trump administration developed its strategy for countering Iran’s growing regional influence.

“These critical measures will impose new sanctions to crack down on
Hezbollah’s financing, and hold it accountable for its acts of death and
destruction,” said Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, according to Reuters.

Washington has in the past imposed sanctions on Hezbollah leader
Hassan Nasrallah and two other members of the organization, for their
alleged role in aiding the Syrian government in its crackdown on
opposition forces.

Elad BenariSource: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/237213 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The coverup continues---

An interesting sidelight to the Russian Uranium One caper was reported by The Hill yesterday, involving a Russian TENEX executive whom the FBI was investigating for bribery and extortion who was granted a visa to enter the U.S. by the Obama administration.

TENEX is an American subsidiary of Rosatom, the company involved in buying an interest in Uranium One.

The records show TENEX executive Vadim Mikerin was engaged in illegal conduct as early as the fall of 2009, yet he was allowed to enter the country by the Obama administration with a L1 temporary work visa when he arrived in December 2011.Milkerin's visa was renewed in August 2014, just months before he was arrested and charged with extortion, the records show. He and his company applied for the visa in summer 2011, records show.The lengthy delay is now being investigated by multiple GOP-led congressional committees, one of which sent a letter Tuesday to the State Department and Homeland Security Department demanding answers."It is concerning that a suspected criminal was able to apply for and renew a work visa while being under FBI investigation," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in the letter.
Officials for the FBI, State and Homeland did not return calls and emails seeking an explanation why Mikerin was granted a visa after the FBI already had evidence he was engaged in wrongdoing.
Officials familiar with law enforcement issues involving visas said it was possible the FBI evidence on Mikerin was not flagged in databases checked by State and Homeland before Mikerin was granted entry.
They added another possibility was that the FBI asked the agencies to allow Mikerin to enter the country so they could monitor his activities as part of a larger counterintelligence operation and detect other possible conspirators.

The latter explanation makes sense. The FBI may have wanted to cast a wider net and believed Mikerin could lead to other co-conspirators.

But as Andrew McCarthy points out, there was a curious delay between the time the FBI knew that Mikerin was conducting criminal activity in this country and his indictment in 2014.

Even though the FBI had an informant collecting damning information, and had a prosecutable case against Mikerin by early 2010, the extortion racket against American energy companies was permitted to continue into the summer of 2014. It was only then that, finally, Mikerin and his confederates were arrested.Why then? This is not rocket science. In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Putin also began massing forces on the Ukrainian border, coordinating and conducting attacks, ultimately taking control of territory. Clearly, the pie-in-the-sky Obama reset was dead. Furthermore, the prosecution of Mikerin's racketeering scheme had been so delayed that the Justice Department risked losing the ability to charge the 2009 felonies because of the five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes.Still, a lid needed to be kept on the case. It would have made for an epic Obama administration scandal, and a body blow to Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes, if in the midst of Russia's 2014 aggression, public attention had been drawn to the failure, four years earlier, to prosecute a national-security case in order to protect Russia's takeover of U.S. nuclear assets.The Obama administration needed to make this case go away – without a public trial if at all possible.Think about this: The investigation of Russian racketeering in the American energy sector was the kind of spectacular success over which the FBI and Justice Department typically do a bells-n-whistles victory lap – the big self-congratulatory press conference followed by the media-intensive prosecutions...and, of course, more press conferences.Here...crickets.

The cover-up continues today. With Democrats like Hillary Clinton claiming that the entire episode has been "debunked" or that it's a nothingburger, getting to the bottom of this scandal is going to be difficult.

It really is an extraordinary story. A nexus of Russian criminal enterprises, U.S. energy companies, and officials in the Obama administration all conspired to enrich each other by selling off 20% of U.S. uranium access.

Sounds like a great plot for a movie – except it really happened, and the cover-up continues.

Rick MoranSource: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/10/russian_under_investigation_for_bribery_by_fbi_given_visa_by_obama_administration.html Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Professor posts conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11, Jews for Armenian Genocide, and claims the Talmud is a racist text.

Rutgers University announced that it is reviewing the "matter" of a
professor who posted a series of anti-Semitic posts on social media.

Michael Chikindas, a microbiology professor at Rutgers’ department of
food science and director of the university’s Center for Digestive
Health, posted dozens of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews
and Israel for many of the world's ills, and even attacked Judaism as
"the most racist religion" in the world.

Chikindas' anti-Semitic posts were first reported by the pro-Israel Israellycool blog.

In one post, Chikindas claimed that "Israel is the terrorist country
aimed at genocidal extermination of the land’s native population,
Palestinians.”

His ire was not limited to Zionists, whom he lumped together with
Orthodox Jews as “the best of two forms of racism.” He also blamed Jews
for human rights catastrophes, egregiously including the 1915 Armenian
Genocide. "We must not forget that the Armenian Genocide was
orchestrated by the Turkish Jews who pretended to be the Turks.”

Chikindas shared numerous anti-Semitic wild conspiracy theories,
including theories claiming that Israel was behind the September 11
terrorist attacks, as well as claims that Jews control the Federal
Reserve, Hollywood, the “cancer industry,” “pornography,”
“sex-trafficking,” and others.

Chikindas denied that he was anti-Semitic in an interview with the Algemeiner Tuesday, arguing that he was one quarter Jewish himself and had a Jewish ex-wife and child.

He further claimed that none of his posts were anti-Semitic and
false, and that the Talmud was full of racist statements against
non-Jews. In fact, the statements are against idolators or those who
persecute the Jews.

Rutgers has announced that it is investigating the matter. University spokesperson Neal Buccino told the Algemeiner: “Professor
Michael Chikindas’ comments and posts on social media are antithetical
to our university’s principles and values of respect for people of all
backgrounds, including, among other groups, our large and vibrant Jewish
community. Such comments do not represent the position of the
University.”

“The university is reviewing this matter to determine if actions
taken in the context of his role as a faculty member at Rutgers may have
violated that policy,” he said.

Garry WilligSource: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/237189 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Obama’s “Sitting” on the ROSATOM’s nuclear crimes was an “Obstruction of Congress” felony. In effect, Putin bribed Secretary of State Clinton.

The Preface:

While Federal investigations may have trouble finding specific quid-pro-quos in Russia’s bribing Hillary Clinton, it
is now clear that all the key high level Obama administration
officials(especially Clinton) knew, as early as 2009, that the Russian
government entity ROSATOM’s subsidiaries were actively committing a vast
criminal “nuclear kickback” conspiracy in the United States.

New
reports have raised legitimate questions about the clear failure of the
Obama Administration to inform the CFIUS Federal governmental board, the
body that approved the 2010 UraniumOne sale to a Russian controlled
corporation, of the Russian “nuclear kickback” case. However, the more
dramatic failure of the Obama Administration was its purposeful neglect
in informing Congress of the ROSATOM’s “nuclear kickback” crimes during
the ratification hearings for the 2010-11 Russian-American New START
nuclear arms treaty.

In effect, Putin bribed Hillary Clinton, US
Secretary of State, in a 2-for-1 corruption scandal. He bought the
UraniumOne approval and the New START Treaty ratification with the same
Clinton Foundation bribe. The problem for the all former high level
national security Obama Administration officials is that under 18 U.S.C.
1505 it is a federal felony to obstruct or impede either a
Congressional “inquiry or investigation” or a “pending proceeding”
before a “federal department” due to corruption. Therefore, the Obama
Administration’s 2009 failure to properly and fully inform the Senate,
and the CFIUS board of ROSATOM’s criminal enterprise in the United
States is a big, severe felony crime.

The Factual Background:

There
is currently ample open-source evidence to conclude that all the key
National Security officials in the Obama Administration (especially Sec
of State Clinton) knew as early as 2009 that Vadm Mikerin, a Russian
national, and his “higher officials” Moscow backers, were engaged in a
vast criminal conspiracy relating to “nuclear kickbacks” and felony
violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices act. Mikerin was a big-wig
in ROSATOM. In 2015, Mikerin pled guilty to the “criminal money
laundering conspiracy involving violations of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act,” and was sent to Federal Prison for 4 years.

According
to its website, ROSATOM is the Russian “State Atomic Energy
Corporation.” The ROSATOM webite continues to state, “ROSATOM is a
proponent of the uniform national policy and best management practices
in nuclear power utilization, the nuclear weapons industry, and nuclear
safety.”

Did you get that? ROSATOM a “proponent of the uniform
national policy” of the Russian “nuclear weapons industry.” In the
United States, Mikerin set up and ran Tenam which was a subsidiary of
Tenex ROSATOM’s foreign trade arm. So, in 2009 and 2010, Sec.
of State Clinton and the entire Obama national security team
intentionally and knowingly withheld time-sensitive national security
information about the Russian key nuclear-arms corporation while the
UraniumOne and New Start treaty were being evaluated by the United
States Senate and CFIUS board.The “Obstruction of Congress” Statute:

Whoever
corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or
communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to
influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the
law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any
department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper
exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or
investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either
House or any joint committee of the Congress—

Shall be fined under
this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense
involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section
2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.

Let’s analyze the statute:I. Whoever II. A. corruptly, or B. by threats or C. force, or D. by any threatening letter or communication III. A. influences, B. obstructs, or C. impedes or D. endeavors to 1. influence, 2. obstruct, or 3. impede IV.
A.1. the due and proper administration of the law under which 2. any
pending proceeding is being had 3. before any department or agency of
the United States, or B. 1. the due and proper exercise of the
power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being
had by a. either House, orb. any committee of either House orc. any
joint committee of the Congress

Shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than 5 years (not more than 8 years if the offense
involves domestic or international terrorism (as defined in section
2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.

Additionally,
for the definition of “corrupt” we need to look at the federal bribery
statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201(b), which criminalizes the corrupt promise or
transfer of any thing of value to influence an official act of a federal
official, a fraud on the United States, or the commission or omission
of any act in violation of the official's duty.

Brief Legal Analysis:

First,
the CFIUS board evaluating the UraniumOne sale to the
ROSATOM subsidiary was clearly “a pending proceeding” “being had before a
department or agency of the United States.”

And, the US
Senate’s and even the House of Representatives’ evaluation of the
UraniumOne sale and especially of the ratification of the New Start
Treaty were clearly a “due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry”
“being had” by “either House, or any committee of either House.”

Secondly,
the withholding of the information of ROSATOM’s “nuclear kickback”
conspiracy from both the CFIUS board and the Congress clearly “impeded,”
and “obstructed” the “inquiry or investigation” of both the CFIUS board
and Congress with respect to UraniumOne and the Congress with respect
to the New START Treaty.

Thirdly, the Obama administration
officials clearly “corruptly” engaged in these actions because , at a
minimum, the intentional failure of the Obama national security
officials to inform CFIUS and the Congress was, under 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)
“corrupt” because they were clearly actions where the “commission or
omission of” the acts were “in violation of the official’s duty.”

Their “Defense” will only sink them further:

A
likely defense by the Obama national security officials will be “we
withheld the information because if we had divulged the information,
CFIUS and Congress would never have let the UraniumOne sale or the New
START Treaty pass.” All they will have proven with this crazy defense
is how relevant and vital the information was, and how critical it was
to timely inform the FIUS and Congressional Committee’s of the
information in the first place.

In short, and in conclusion, the
Obama national security team should lawyer-up because they are looking
at massive criminal claims coming their way.

Mark Langfan is Chairman of Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) and specializes in
security issues, has created an original educational 3d Topographic Map
System of Israel to facilitate clear understanding of the dangers facing
Israel and its water supply. It has been studied by US lawmakers and
can be seen at www.marklangfan.com.
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/21172 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Justice Ministry "won't allow left-wing organizations to set facts on the ground by dragging the court into the political sphere," Ayelet Shaked says

Justice Minister
Ayelet Shaked

Photo: Oren Ben Hakoon

"The
High Court of Justice won't decide the future of the Judea and Samaria
settlement enterprise," Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tuesday,
adding her officer "will not allow left-wing organizations to set facts
on the ground by dragging the court into the political sphere."

Speaking at a Kohelet Policy Forum in
Jerusalem, Shaked said that "the Left can't win the election so they
[left-wing groups] file hundreds of nuisance petitions with the court
every year, effectively waging lawfare against the Israeli government.
We won’t be a party to it."

She stressed that the "government aims to
bolster the settlement enterprise," adding that when it comes to
petitions concerning this issue,

"The State Attorney's Office represents the
state – not the personal opinion of an individual attorney, certainly
not on an issue that is part of the government's core operations."

The government, Shaked said, "is stable,
and it will make it to 2019," when the next general elections are
scheduled to take place.

Construction Minister Yoav Gallant, who
also addressed the Kohelet forum on Tuesday, slammed the judiciary for
trying to "undermine the government."

"The ongoing judicialization [of politics]
weakens the political echelon while empowering the bureaucratic echelon,
which could eventually undercut democracy," he said.

"Under the current situation, the biggest
criminal has the right to voice his position, but the government and its
ministers don't have that right. What tools allow judges to know better
than military officials?

"The Supreme Court is not free of populism.
It's inconceivable that the Supreme Court knows more about security,
energy, and housing than the executive branch. The government wants to
hit the gas, but the judiciary keeps hitting the brakes," he said.

Yair Altman and Israel Hayom StaffSource: http://www.israelhayom.com/2017/10/25/justice-minister-high-court-wont-decide-future-of-settlement-enterprise/ Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Jordan's King Abdullah has reportedly expressed significant disapproval over the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation deal
during a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in
Amman several days ago, Palestinian and Jordanian sources told Israel
Hayom on Tuesday.

In the meeting, Abdullah said he was
apprehensive at Hamas' prospective integration in the Palestinian
Liberation Organization, the possibility the former Hamas leader Khaled
Mashal will vie in the next Palestinian presidential elections, and
Hamas' rule in the West Bank. These constitute a threat to Jordan, as
they will likely destabilize the internal security of the kingdom, the
king told Abbas.

Jordan also reportedly rejected a request by Mashaal to reopen Hamas' offices in Amman.

The move would help Mashaal integrate Hamas into the PLO and succeed Abbas.

Abdullah briefed Abbas on the decision to
deny Hamas' request, saying that renewing the terrorist organization's
activities in Jordan would strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas'
parent movement, in Jordan.

Jordanian and Palestinian officials said
the king stressed that the Jordanians were enraged that the Palestinians
did not update them on the contents of the reconciliation agreement
before it was inked. The deal was formulated under the auspices of
Egypt, and as such, it does not consider Jordan's security interests
regarding Hamas' activity in the West Bank, the Islamist terrorist
group's participation in a Palestinian unity government and Hamas'
integration into PLO institutes.

Abbas, for his part, accused Jordan of
"abandoning" the Palestinian issue in favor of U.S. President Donald
Trump's efforts to reach a Middle East peace agreement.

Middle East expert Pinhas Inbari, from the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs said Tuesday that the reconciliation
deal was intended from the start to promote Trump's regional peace
plan. The reconciliation would give in to Saudi and Egyptian demands for
internal Palestinian unity, Inbari claimed, by disconnecting Hamas from
the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, with which Hamas recently thawed
relations.

Daniel SiryotiSource: http://www.israelhayom.com/2017/10/25/jordan-reportedly-furious-over-palestinian-reconciliation-deal/ Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

"Burning hatred against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence."

Originally published under the title "A Tale of Racism and Family Violence."

Abdelkader
Merah and his sister Souad are on trial in France for inspiring their
younger brother Mohamed (top) to go on a 2012 killing spree.

"Burning hatred against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence."

That
was how Anne Chenevat, a major witness, described the Merah family – a
divorced mother, three sons and two daughters – to the Special Criminal
Court of Paris last Tuesday.

Mohamed
Merah, the youngest of the family's sons, killed seven people –
including three Jewish children shot at point-blank range – and maimed
six others in the southern French towns of Montauban and Toulouse
between March 11 and March 19, 2012. He was himself killed by security
forces three days later.

The
main defendants in the present trial, which started three weeks ago,
are his older brother Abdelkader Merah and his older sister Souad. The
siblings are accused of inspiring the killing spree. Abdelkader was
arrested in 2012; Souad fled to Algeria.

Anne
Chenevat, a former partner of the eldest Merah brother, Abdelghani,
testified about the toxic influence of the family's Algerian-born
mother, Zuleikha Aziri. "I was routinely abused and spat upon by
Zuleikha for being 'a dirty French woman' and a 'dirty Jewess'."

Anne
Chenevat's importance as a witness stems from the fact that she was for
six years the partner of Abdelghani Merah, the eldest Merah brother.
According to her, Zuleikha Aziri, the Algerian-born mother, would use
electric wire to beat her children. Violence between the brothers was
rampant: on one occasion, Abdelkader inflicted seven stab wounds on
Abdelghani.

Hatred
for the non-Muslim French and antisemitism were held as self-evident in
the family." As a result, I was routinely abused and spat upon by
Zuleikha for being 'a dirty French woman' and a 'dirty Jewess',"
Chenevat said. A Catholic by birth, she once admitted to the Merahs that
she had a Jewish grandfather.

She
left Abdelghani because of his addiction to alcohol and drugs and
raised their son Theodore alone. Also called also as a witness to the
trial, Abdelghani concurred with his former companion about the Merahs'
ethnic and religious prejudices: "We all grew up hating France and the
Jews, it is a fact."

Abdelghani Merah: "We all grew up hating France and the Jews, it is a fact."

According
to him, Abdelkader turned to radical Islam in 2006 along with Souad and
frequently visited salafist mosques and madrasas in Egypt, and was the
main nefarious influence on Mohamed.

Theodore
Chenevat, the son of Anne Chenevat and Abdelghani Merah – now a
21-year-old business and economics student – chillingly told the Court
that in order to indoctrinate him into jihad, his uncle Abdelkader
shared with him videos of "Islamic beheading" and attempted to have him
visit mortuaries.

When
the counsel of Mohamed Merah's Jewish victims, Elie Korchia, asked him
whether Abdelkader and Mohamed should be seen as two heads of a single
terrorist beast, he answered that the fugitive older sister Souad should
be counted as a third and equally dangerous head.

The trial, which is expected to last until early November, continues.

Michael Gurfinkiel, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is the
founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a
conservative think tank in France.Source: http://www.meforum.org/6977/antisemitism-islamism-in-france Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The wholesale theft that 70 residents of the village Beit Awwa committed in the fields of Moshav Shekef
in the Lachish region illustrates the extent of the problem.

The
first time I met Yoel Zilberman was in 2008 in Mitzpe Sando in the
Galilee. My wife and I had come to the farm, a little place on a
hilltop, and we saw the silo that was black as coal, two days after it
was deliberately set on fire, along with the hay bales and tractor. It
was a sight typical of the 1930s, the lawless days that predated the
founding of the state.

Zilberman, an officer in the Shayetet 13
naval commando unit, had taken unpaid leave from the army to save his
father's Galilee farm, which was vulnerable to theft and destruction
perpetrated by the local Arabs. Zionism's fight for its life in the
Galilee and the Negev doesn't play out in murders, but rather in
"minor," daily acts of economic and agricultural terrorism. Fences are
destroyed, herds and crops are subject to constant theft, irrigation
systems are wrecked, and protection money is demanded – a combination of
crimes that ultimately serve nationalist goals of keeping Israeli
farmers down, making the profession unprofitable, and in the end ousting
them from the land so it can be taken over.

Zilberman's success in saving his family's
farm through presence and guard duty led him to found the group Hashomer
Hachadash, out of the understanding that agricultural crime is a
widespread national problem rather than a localized spat between
neighbors. The group attracted civilians from all sectors and of all
political orientations who were ready to donate their time and spend
days and nights guarding fields and herds. My wife and I volunteer for
guard duty and are pleased with the thanks from the farmers and the
smile of relief on their faces at the knowledge that they'll be able to
get a night's sleep, for a change.

"We're finally able to sleep at night";
"the farm has finally stopped losing money"; "I was about to get rid of
the herd and then Hashomer Hachadash showed up" – these are some of the
reactions I heard from the farmers whose livelihood was saved by the
volunteers whose shirts read, "My brother's keeper," a kind of reference
to Cain, who killed his brother Abel and played innocent, asking, "Am I
my brother's keeper?"

We volunteers came to give and wound up the
recipients. We don't get a dime, not even gas money, but a smile of
thanks from those who felt abandoned and then a brother appeared and
helped save his livelihood so he could continue to hold onto the
nation's land and our future in this country. We volunteers are thankful
for the opportunity to contribute, both to the farmers and to the
wonderful grassroots organization that came from the people, not the
government, and now coordinates fully with the Israel Police and the
Border Police.

The wholesale theft that 70 residents of the village Beit Awwa committed in the fields of Moshav Shekef
in the Lachish region illustrates the extent of the problem. A gang of
thieves that will stop at nothing, vs. a weak police and indifferent
courts, have made agricultural theft and sabotage into an easy,
risk-free sport. Indeed, after some of the thieves were caught, the
police released the minors. Why?

The incident at Moshav Shekef reflects what
happens when there is no security, not to mention that an incursion for
the purpose of theft could wind up leading to murder. On the other
hand, dozens of farms that have been assigned security by the Hashomer
Hachadash volunteers are already breathing more easily. Anyone who
thinks that mutual aid, volunteerism and contributing to society without
expecting anything in return are old-fashioned values that have
vanished, is wrong. The old, good Israel is alive and kicking, right
now.

Boaz Haetzni is a publicist and a member of Hashomer Hachadash agricultural organization.Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/stand-up-to-agricultural-terrorism/ Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Russia's sabotage of the implementation of sections of the JCPOA, and
its claim that Iran's 8.5-ton inventory of enriched uranium has gone
missing, contribute directly to Iran's unhindered ability to develop
nuclear weapons capacity.

Introduction

Part I
of our analysis of the Russian-Iranian existential threat to Israel,
published October 23, 2017, focused on the conventional military
dimension of the threat posed by Russia's facilitation of Iran's
expansion in Syria, up to Israel's borders with both Lebanon and Syria.

Part II, below, focuses on the nuclear dimension of this threat.

Adding The Nuclear Dimension To The Threat

Russia is making it possible for Iran to
evade inspection of its nuclear program, to which it is subject under
the JCPOA. In this way, it adds a nuclear element to the existential
threat to Israel, as follows:

A. Iran's inventory of 8.5 tons of
enriched uranium, shipped out of Iran to Russia in December 2015 in
accordance with the JCPOA, has gone missing in Russia. This was attested
to by the Obama administration's State Department lead coordinator on
Iran, Stephen Mull, at a February 11, 2016 House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, where he said: "It has not yet been decided where
exactly Russia will put this information [sic]." But under questioning,
Mull acknowledged that Washington had not verified the Iranian shipment.[1]

B. The most egregious example of
Russia's facilitation of Tehran's development of nuclear weapons
capability is its support of Iran's refusal to allow International
Atomic Energy Agency inspections in accordance with Section T of the
JCPOA, which prohibits Iran from "designing, developing, fabricating,
acquiring, or using multi-point explosive detonation systems suitable
for a nuclear explosive device" and also from "designing, developing,
fabricating, acquiring, or using explosive diagnostic systems (streak
cameras, framing cameras and flash x-ray cameras)" – unless these
activities are "approved by the Joint Commission for non-nuclear
purposes" and "subject to monitoring." Iran refuses to allow such
monitoring, and Russia supports it in its refusal. Russia claims, in a
preposterous argument, that the IAEA is not authorized to deal with this
part of the JCPOA. Its stance was illustrated in October 20, 2017
remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Moscow Nonproliferation
Conference: "It is impossible to strengthen what does not exist. The IAEA has no mandate to verify Section T."[2]

Thus,
Russia's sabotage of the implementation of sections of the JCPOA, and
its claim that Iran's 8.5-ton inventory of enriched uranium has gone
missing, contribute directly to Iran's unhindered ability to develop
nuclear weapons capacity.

Congressional investigators are also zeroing in on the suspicious Uranium One deal.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee bankrolled the explosive, far-fetched dossier that attempted to smear President Trump by falsely linking him to Russia, according to new reports.

The news came days after President Trump suggested Democrats, Russia, or the FBI may have helped fund research that Democrat communications firm Fusion GPS used to compile the infamous dossier.

“Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th[,]” the president tweeted Oct. 19. “Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?” In Oct. 21, he followed up, tweeting “Justice Department and/or FBI should immediately release who paid for it.”

News of the dossier funding came as two congressional committees announced plans Tuesday to jointly investigate the 2010 sale of a U.S. uranium concern to a Russian company. As U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton approved the transaction as millions of dollars poured in to her corrupt family foundation from Russian sources.

There are “very, very real concerns about why we would allow a Russian-owned company to get access to 20 percent of America’s uranium supply,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said Monday. “It’s important we find out why that deal went through.”

The character-assassination dossier is the unvetted, salacious, 35-page report written by British former spy Christopher Steele and published by cat-video and gossip website BuzzFeed. The dubious package of documents dubbed the “piss-gate dossier” claimed, among other things, that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow in front of him.

The dossier put together by Democrat-aligned Fusion GPS was just one of many dirty tricks Hillary Clinton’s campaign used in an effort to undermine her opponent’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Clinton also personally authorized the illicit efforts of felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.

Although it was previously known that Democrat monies had flowed to Fusion GPS, the Washington Post provided more specific evidence Tuesday, reporting that Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Marc Elias hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against Trump. Funded at the time by a still-unidentified Republican donor, the firm had already begun investigating Trump’s background when Hillary began picking up the research tab.

“The Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the firm's efforts through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day,” The Hill newspaper reports.

Employees of Fusion GPS have refused through their lawyers to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. "We cannot in good conscience do anything but advise our clients to stand on their constitutional privileges, the attorney work product doctrine and contractual obligations," Fusion GPS attorney Josh Levy wrote earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s efforts to cover for the Clintons is about to get harder.That’s because the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Oversight and Government Reform will carry out a joint investigation of the 2010 sale of a U.S. company controlling one-fifth of the nation’s uranium supply to a Russian company.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) says a confidential informant has come forward and that the two committees are trying to get the Department of Justice (DoJ) to release the person from a nondisclosure agreement, The Hill reports. House GOP leadership is fully committed to the Uranium One probe, DeSantis said Tuesday, of the investigation that is viewed as separate and distinct from broader investigations into election meddling by Russians.

The Hill reported last week that “the FBI had gathered solid evidence that Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks as part of an effort to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.”

The FBI also reportedly has documentary evidence showing Russian nuclear officials funneling “millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow[.]”

The Uranium One deal was approved by the Department of State acting as one of nine institutional members of an inter-agency review board called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Clinton’s people claim Hillary wasn’t personally involved in the decision but chances are they’re lying.

As part of her book tour to promote her What Happened memoir, Hillary has been spewing lies about what she did and did not do, and hurting her party in the process by keeping her almost innumerable misdeeds front and center.

Mrs. Clinton told C-SPAN this week that probes into the shady uranium deal she rubber-stamped after her husband was paid $500,000 for a single speech in Russia and more than $100 million was “donated” by individuals associated with Uranium One to the cash-for-future-presidential-favors trading platform known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, were “baloney.” The various allegations have been “debunked repeatedly,” she opined indignantly.

All of this is only happening because Republicans are becoming nervous about the federal investigation into Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, Clinton said.

This is, of course, coming from a woman the great William Safire described as a “congenital liar.” Clinton created a homebrew email system to conceal her illicit activities while secretary of state, not to keep her discussions of yoga and grandchildren from prying eyes.

Poor Hillary, as usual, claims to be the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy aimed at shutting down her family’s ongoing grifting operations.

But in reality, evidence increasingly suggests that it is the Clintons and Democrats – not President Trump and Republicans – who are the ones with real, lasting ties to Russia, and before that, to the Communist operatives of the defunct Soviet Union.

These left-wingers accused their adversaries of their own sins as a political tactic.